9 ms·

Heathkit

241 points by hypertexthero 3y ago

hypertexthero 3y ago
Steve Jobs in Make Something Wonderful: > I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product, if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. > I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way. — https://stevejobsarchive.com/book https://stevejobsarchive.com/book
- dalke 3y ago
  > It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. My Dad would get Heathkit and I would build them. I even built 3 H-151 (IBM compatible) computers. My soldering skills were pretty good. But I didn't understand how they worked - I just followed the instructions. When I was a kid, around 5 years old, back in 1976, we got our first home game console. It was a Heathkit Pong clone, with variants for a couple related games, including duck hunt. A few years back I read https://pong-story.com/heathkit.htm https://pong-story.com/heathkit.htm which told me that my Dad must have had a Heathkit TV back then: > First, it requires a Heathkit TV set to operate because of its composite output. Back in 1976, only monitors and hi-tech equipment had a composite input. To use this system, the user had to open his TV set in order to connect a few wires to its electronic circuits. This is the case with the Heathkit TV sets: the user manual explains how to connect the system to several TV sets released by Heathkit. The system has another interesting feature: the sound does not come from the system itself like most of the other PONG consoles, but comes from the TV set
  - cf100clunk 3y ago
    > I didn't understand how they worked - I just followed the instructions Indeed, Heath's instructions took a paint-by-numbers approach that did not offer analysis or explanation, so I have to disagree with hypertexthero that more than very basic theory was communicated. As for circuitry explanation, I found out the hard way on one occasion that I hadn't soldered a transistor properly, but there were no instructions on how to test for such a problem within the same "anyone can do this on a kitchen table" kit, so I mailed the board to Heath and they sent it back in working order for a small fee and postage. It is nevertheless a fond memory.
    - wrs 3y ago
      It’s been a looong time since I made a Heathkit (I think the last one was an oscilloscope in the 80s) but I do remember a theory of operation section in the manual, separate from the very clear assembly instructions. It’s true of the ones I randomly checked in the archive [0]. That said, the mail-in repair service for when things go sideways was a fantastic feature that not many kit companies had/have. [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit
      - dalke 3y ago
        The first H-151 I built had a flaw. We went to the Heathkit store, about 45 minutes away, which provided the instructions for the fix. It was something like "scratch this trace off the circuit board and solder a wire between these two points."
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  "Also, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you from 'making something wonderful' with my own company's products. It was irresponsible for Heathkit to put high-voltage electronic equipment into the hands of the common folk. Someone could get shocked, or burn themselves with a soldering iron. And those Heathkit people didn't even bother to invent proprietary screws, so any kid with a quarter-inch nutdriver could take the cover off and get a face full of X-rays. No, not for us."
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Be careful what you wish for, Apple Corporate might make a "Tinkering Program" where they ship you a flight case full of $40,000 worth of oscilloscopes and GPIO for a weekend so you may implement your idea. Only if you're okay paying 30% royalties on your invention of course, where would you be without their generous help after all?
  - fanatic2pope 3y ago
    It is really interesting to think about what the version of Jobs who talked so reverently about those kits would have thought if he were shown the Apple "what is a computer" ad from a few years ago.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      Jobs was certainly an inspirational entrepreneur and CEO but he always talked out of both sides of his mouth. He'd mug for the cameras and say all of that lofty stuff about creativity, bicycles for the mind, etc., and then go back to the office for a knock-down, drag-out fight with Woz about whether the Apple ][ should come with expansion slots or a padlock. In business terms, Heathkit isn't something that he would have respected as anything but an unscalable niche hobby. Sucks that he would've been right about that.
      - musicale 3y ago
        All of these things are true. Jobs was clearly brilliant and creative and also ultimately a shrewd (and somewhat ruthless) businessman. But he was right about the transformative power of building things yourself.
rwl4 3y ago
They seem to be down. In the meantime: https://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop https://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heat... As a kid, I remember seeing their Hero 2000 on Mr Wizard. It ignited my imagination and I ordered a catalog. Then I saw the price. I went on to get a number of other robots, mostly from Tomy, but they paled in comparison to Hero 2000. When I got a little older, I even started reading about neural networks. Shame I never went further with that!
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  I put a few pics and videos of my dad's old Hero Jr. up. I barely remember him piecing it together as one of my earliest memories. Still works fine. Had a little Y2K glitch but was no problem. Just thinks it's 1923 now. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-hero-jr-personal-robot-from-heathkit-a-1984-product-way-ahead-of-its-time/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-hero-jr-personal-rob... A guy keeps contacting me to try to sell his if you want one.
  - rwl4 3y ago
    Thanks for the offer. TBH, now that I'm older, I have come to realize that some super neat-o things don't really fit into my life and would be sadly neglected. I've contemplated creating a display case in my office of all the gadgets I've bought over the years that are in pristine condition.
  - quercusa 3y ago
    The sonar sensor looks like the one from the Polaroid SX-70, another wonder of that age.
- varjag 3y ago
  As a kid in then-USSR I've seen Heathkit Hero in a translated book on robotics. It felt like a piece of tech from Alpha Centauri.
- ncr100 3y ago
  (humor?) Server is in an unheathy state
gregoriol 3y ago
First, Cloudflare verification Then, Internal Server Error Love it!
- bigattichouse 3y ago
  Hackernews hug of death.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
My father, a consummate scientist, geologist, and radio geek, hand-built our home component stereo system from Heathkits. That includes speakers, turntable, receiver/tuner and amplifier. He also ran speaker wires through the walls so that the impressively massive speakers could take their rightful place along the long wall of our living room. The stereo was installed in an ornate antique piece of wood furniture which we referred to as "The Commode" for reasons I can't fathom. EDIT: apparently, "commode" has been a word for normal furniture way longer than it was a euphemism for "toilet". It was a long, long time until I truly and deeply appreciated what a labor of love, and what a technical achievement that must have been for my father to build that. I never really liked the stereo because it seemed obsolete before its time and didn't sound all that good, but man, handbuilt. Hats off to you, papa.
- markbnj 3y ago
  Came here to say this. My Dad also built our stereo, as well as our first color television, from Heathkit kits. He built some other stuff too... an aircraft radio receiver I think. He was a mechanical engineer (now retired). I remember hanging out in his workshop as he pieced the projects together. It was my first exposure to real electronics and componentry.
  - spookthesunset 3y ago
    Did that TV have an ultrasonic remote? Cause our heathkit TV did…
    - dole 3y ago
      My dad built our color console TV from Heathkit and we had at least one of those remotes. Besides volume and channel rocker buttons, it also had them for the tint and contrast too (?) and that was about it, IIRC.
- ambientenv 3y ago
  Wonderful! Had similar experiences, too. My dad and I built the AR1500 receiver together on top of the ping pong table in the basement. My first "transistor radio" as a kid was also a Heathkit. I can recall test equipment like a VTVM and other stuff which we also built together. It was a great introduction to electronics and radio with lifelong benefits.
W-Stool 3y ago
Before there were personal computers if you were a geek you likely studied to get a ham radio license and built Heathkit amateur radios. This was me in the early 70s as a kid and it really helped propel me into a IT career later on when the technology became affordable/available. Heathkit was really something back in the day!
- ghaff 3y ago
  Heathkit was of an era when you could still reasonably build non-toy electronics projects from components without unreasonably expensive test equipment and other tools. It arguably wasn't until Raspberry Pi and Arduinos that we got back to that, albeit at a different level of abstraction.
  - alden5 3y ago
    I'd say between that healthkit and arduino's it was snap-circuits which allowed kids like me to get into electronics, the manual was detailed and looking back it's fairly technical although it unfortunately it always assumed you knew what they meant, the manual would tell you to never short circuit the battery but 7-y/old me was so confused as to why you shouldn't because it never got into things like electron flow.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Way back when I remember having having this kit which consisted of magnetic blocks that were variously switches, diodes, buzzers, etc. that you could snap together to build various types of circuits. At one point I had something else that was closer to a breadboard (though it wasn't) but as I vaguely recall it had a lot more options but it was hard to actually build a working circuit. I did briefly get into Heathkit after I graduated school at one point and built a power supply that I still use sometimes but it was pretty much the end of the Heathkit era at that point.
      - tamaharbor 3y ago
        Raytheon Lectron!
drones 3y ago
Wow! I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over this. I sometimes get a little jealous of the old timers - I think being able to grow up with the evolution of computers and learn as they become more complex is a really wonderful thing. Had a look around and I'm interested in buying this microcontroller kit, has anyone tried this before? What did you think?: https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215708/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/introductory-microcomputer-microcontroller-experimenter-kit-heathkit-educational-systems-ex-1001-54?category=28 https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215708/https://shop.heat... I took a Nand2Tetris course at my Uni and really enjoyed it, but was disappointed when there was no practical element for physically building any of the circuits. Hoping this can scratch my itch.
- privong 3y ago
  > I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over this. Unfortunately Heathkit didn't really make kits from 1992 until recently (I think the past year or two, though the Wikipedia article[0] is vague on when it resumed), aside from a brief, failed attempt in 2012. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  Retrocomputing continues to increase in popularity. In addition to the Heatkit, you might be interested in kits from RC2014, SmartyKit, Ben Eater, Foenix C256, etc. There’s many more that are based around an RPi or microcontroller if you’re less concerned about authenticity.
- stevekemp 3y ago
  Take a look at https://www.tindie.com/ https://www.tindie.com/ there are many single-board Z80/6502 computers that you can assemble for sale. You could start smaller with other simple devices, but there are lot of options if you click around.
- koromak 3y ago
  Ben Eater might be up your ally. Just finished his 8-bit CPU build, boy it was an experience. https://eater.net/8bit/ https://eater.net/8bit/
johnnyballgame 3y ago
I remember my dad building the depth-finder/fish-finder. We always had it in the boat with us. Who knows if it ever really helped us find fish, but we sure had fun with it. Side note - I really miss that you can barely buy RC car "kits" anymore. Everything now comes RTR (ready-to-run). And that takes most of the fun out of it, for me at least.
- Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
  Beside traxxas, nearly all manufacturer propose kit, especially for high end rc car :) For plane and quadcopter it’s way harder though :\ submarines is still a more open field though ! Then there’s the hydraulics model. None are in kit, which saddens me a lot. Maybe too dangerous for common folk (like building a tube amp)
AlbertCory 3y ago
I built an FM tuner from a kit that I actually used for a long time. Looked kinda funky, though. They're the only reason I've ever heard of Benton Harbor, MI.
jpmattia 3y ago
So glad to see the return of these guys. Growing up in the 70s, they were one of the few portals to the universe of electrical engineering.
euroderf 3y ago
dunno how Velleman kits might stack up in terms of educational value.
sizzzzlerz 3y ago
I bought a morse code keyer from Heathkit when I was a kid. It was the only thing I could afford at the time but I spent many hours reading their catalog and lusting over their ham radio kits.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
My first program was for a Heathkit programmable calculator that I got (and put together) in the mid-1970s.
_yb2s 3y ago
Growing up as a (young? future? wannabe?) engineer kid in the 90s, I immediately knew who the powerful old engineering wizards were upon walking into their house, because of the 'Heathkit' logos on inconspicuous devices. On more than one occasion, I would end up at a house party of people I didn't know, and then start hunting for whomever made those Heathkits, because I knew they would be an amazing person to meet, that could teach me something.
robomartin 3y ago
I still have a pair of robot arms form the Hero 2000 robot. Nice and robust. Not too fast, yet it wouldn't be too hard to update them to use DC brushless motors, etc. http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html
- webprofusion 3y ago
  I always wanted the Hero robot - it was in the Maplin catalog when I was about 9yrs old :)
squarefoot 3y ago
I hope to be wrong; as an European I know Heathkit only from what was published back in the day on Electronics magazines, the occasional kit that arrived here and the archive of old projects of that era still available online [0,1], however this appears to me as a completely different business with mostly overpriced products; as for now all I see is the name. [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit [1] https://archive.org/search?query=Heathkit https://archive.org/search?query=Heathkit
_whiteCaps_ 3y ago
I still use my Heathkit power supply that I built in the 90's. I should give my dad a call and thank him for buying it for me. Between that and the TI 99/4A, it led me to my career in software development.
noefingway 3y ago
In the early to mid-60s I built a shortwave radio and a digital clock. Unfortunately neither survived. I still think about that clock sitting by my bed, glowing reddish orange. Sigh....
mark_l_watson 3y ago
When I was a kid in, I think it was 1959, my Dad bought me a Heathkit short wave radio. I did much of the soldering myself, with my Dad supervising. The radio worked and for years afterwards, I listened to long wavelength broadcasts from around the world. I had an antenna in our yard that was 30 feet off the ground, and we lived on a hill. I was amazed at what I could receive.
- ddingus 3y ago
  I did a similar thing in the late 70's. While maybe there was less to receive, it was a core experience I value.
deleted 3y ago
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Starwatcher2001 3y ago
One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit to launch a life long interest in electronics. Still have the PSU in the loft and a handful of old circuits lovingly converted to Veroboard, or homemake PCBs made from copper-clad board etched with ferric chloride (until my mum got the vapours about me "messing around with chemicals" and stopped that route).
cf100clunk 3y ago
Back in the 1950s and '60s my dad built a few EICO kit devices. They were another supplier of build-it-yourself electronic testing equipment to go along with Heathkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eico There was a lot of military surplus gear back then too for DIYers.
WalterBright 3y ago
I built several Heathkids, including an H11 (PDP-11 computer) with all the accessories. They were all a wonderful experience. The kits were excellent.
crunkykd 3y ago
I remember getting a Lafayette 3-pickup electric guitar and building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. That thing had a dual-spring reverb too. I got a 4x12" speaker cabinet with Celstion speakers from the newspaper classifieds for $75. That thing was loud, and had a super high-frequency squeal when you turned it up. I think they just used a high-bandwidth amp design from their scopes rather than design a ground-up audio amp. But it taught me about oscillations, shocks from ungrounded chassis voltages, and electronics in general.
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop http://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heath... https://archive.ph/68k0r https://archive.ph/68k0r
rmason 3y ago
My entire ham radio station was built from Heathkits in the sixties. I still have the transceiver and linear amplifier in storage. Been meaning to replace all the capacitors and fire it back up. It would be like restoring a car I drove in my teen age years, reminding me of many good times. Got on their mailing list when they attempted a comeback but haven't heard a thing from them in years.
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]
p1mrx 3y ago
https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm-gc-1006-26 https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm... > So the time stays accurate and the alarm stays active with no line power--for weeks. > Batteries: 6 AA cells required (not included). Seems strange to brag about 6 AA batteries keeping time for a few weeks, when there are watches that run for 10 years on a coin cell. Maybe the batteries actually power the LEDs?
- ddingus 3y ago
  Different processes. The watches run at 32768 Hz. And they have crazy efficient electronics. A couple of gates in your clock likely exceed the entire power budget of a watch.
wduquette 3y ago
In the mid-70's my dad built a Heathkit-branded DEC PDP-11, with a dumb terminal and a paper tape reader/punch for I/O. Later he got dual 8" floppy drive, and upgraded the memory from 16K to 28K (the maximum!). I learned to program BASIC and Pascal on that machine (with a few nods at Assembler and FORTRAN 4), and never looked back. Still programming today.
MrFoof 3y ago
Our family TV growing up was a Heathkit. Somewhere in the 20-25” range, with a (wired) remote control. My father built his way up to it. They kept it around for over 25 years. The reality is if anything went wrong with it, my father still had the instructions and could just refer to it to ultimately perform a repair.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Heathkit products were available in the UK but relatively expensive. That market niche was taken by a huge electronics hobbyist industry which included ten or so popular stores, a handful of monthly magazines, and various suppliers of project kits. The kits were advertised in the magazines and occasionally a kit would be featured as a project. Bigger projects could be spread over many months, with fairly minimal assembly instructions - often just a board view with component IDs/values - but relatively detailed "How it works" breakdowns. There would also be regular features about technician/cookbook-level design topics. Not exactly EE grad level engineering, but enough of an overview to glue simple circuits together. While some kits were complete others required inventive design for packaging, labelling, and board connections. IMO it was more diverse and DIY-oriented scene with a smaller range of projects, but less hand-holding and more educational background detail. I know the US had a similar scene, but some of the UK magazines had an attitude that was irreverent, fun, but still educational. I don't think there was a US equivalent. I still wish we could have afforded an H11 though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11
musicale 3y ago
I like the surface-mount soldering kit.
Animats 3y ago
The new owner of Heathkit showed up at a wake for the maker movement a few years back. TechShop and Maker Faire people were there, too. The Heathkit guy said that making a new kit was surprisingly hard and took about six months to go from prototype to user-buildable kit. Heathkit today is very retro. If you want to look forward, there's Adafruit and Seeed Studio.
8bitsrule 3y ago
I might pay $130 for a reliable clock AND AM AND FM-stereo radio in one box. But no, the statement that "AM broadcast radio is the best band for learning about radio" is just about as wrong as it can get, kids. Except then they say "you might hear stations from half-way across the continent". Well, in that case, if you like Talk radio, 7MHz might be your best choice. (Antenna's a lot shorter too.)
vertnerd 3y ago
I put together the Heathkit HW-101 SSB/CW ham radio transceiver in the summer of 1977. It was one of the happiest times of my life. Now that I think about it, that probably explains a lot about me.
ChrisRR 3y ago
I wish people would put at least some blurb in the title if they're just going to post random links. Sure it's interesting, but it's not tied to any recent news, and so I have to click every link just to find out if it's interesting to me
- hypertexthero 3y ago
  Sorry about that! I’ll remember to do so next time.
runamok 3y ago
I'd like to get the ruler but the shipping is rather pricey. $17 for USPS priority when the product is $59.95. Perhaps because of its dimensions.
nahnahg 3y ago
[dead]
williamDafoe 3y ago
I have to agree that Heathkit instructions often carried completely bogus theories of operation. I remember my 3-transistor experimental circuits set. When the manual tried to explain transistors it had a little guy at the top of the stairway which was the emitter waiting at a door that was opened and closed by a guy from the base wire and when they went through the door they went out through the collector (PNP transistor). Semiconductors are so simple that it would have been easier to give a real explanation than this ridiculous piece of bologne!
dddddrr 3y ago
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241 points by hypertexthero 3y ago

Steve Jobs in Make Something Wonderful: > I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product, if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. > I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way. — https://stevejobsarchive.com/book https://stevejobsarchive.com/book

dalke 3y ago
> It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. My Dad would get Heathkit and I would build them. I even built 3 H-151 (IBM compatible) computers. My soldering skills were pretty good. But I didn't understand how they worked - I just followed the instructions. When I was a kid, around 5 years old, back in 1976, we got our first home game console. It was a Heathkit Pong clone, with variants for a couple related games, including duck hunt. A few years back I read https://pong-story.com/heathkit.htm https://pong-story.com/heathkit.htm which told me that my Dad must have had a Heathkit TV back then: > First, it requires a Heathkit TV set to operate because of its composite output. Back in 1976, only monitors and hi-tech equipment had a composite input. To use this system, the user had to open his TV set in order to connect a few wires to its electronic circuits. This is the case with the Heathkit TV sets: the user manual explains how to connect the system to several TV sets released by Heathkit. The system has another interesting feature: the sound does not come from the system itself like most of the other PONG consoles, but comes from the TV set
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  > I didn't understand how they worked - I just followed the instructions Indeed, Heath's instructions took a paint-by-numbers approach that did not offer analysis or explanation, so I have to disagree with hypertexthero that more than very basic theory was communicated. As for circuitry explanation, I found out the hard way on one occasion that I hadn't soldered a transistor properly, but there were no instructions on how to test for such a problem within the same "anyone can do this on a kitchen table" kit, so I mailed the board to Heath and they sent it back in working order for a small fee and postage. It is nevertheless a fond memory.
  - wrs 3y ago
    It’s been a looong time since I made a Heathkit (I think the last one was an oscilloscope in the 80s) but I do remember a theory of operation section in the manual, separate from the very clear assembly instructions. It’s true of the ones I randomly checked in the archive [0]. That said, the mail-in repair service for when things go sideways was a fantastic feature that not many kit companies had/have. [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit
    - dalke 3y ago
      The first H-151 I built had a flaw. We went to the Heathkit store, about 45 minutes away, which provided the instructions for the fix. It was something like "scratch this trace off the circuit board and solder a wire between these two points."
CamperBob2 3y ago
"Also, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you from 'making something wonderful' with my own company's products. It was irresponsible for Heathkit to put high-voltage electronic equipment into the hands of the common folk. Someone could get shocked, or burn themselves with a soldering iron. And those Heathkit people didn't even bother to invent proprietary screws, so any kid with a quarter-inch nutdriver could take the cover off and get a face full of X-rays. No, not for us."
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, Apple Corporate might make a "Tinkering Program" where they ship you a flight case full of $40,000 worth of oscilloscopes and GPIO for a weekend so you may implement your idea. Only if you're okay paying 30% royalties on your invention of course, where would you be without their generous help after all?
- fanatic2pope 3y ago
  It is really interesting to think about what the version of Jobs who talked so reverently about those kits would have thought if he were shown the Apple "what is a computer" ad from a few years ago.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Jobs was certainly an inspirational entrepreneur and CEO but he always talked out of both sides of his mouth. He'd mug for the cameras and say all of that lofty stuff about creativity, bicycles for the mind, etc., and then go back to the office for a knock-down, drag-out fight with Woz about whether the Apple ][ should come with expansion slots or a padlock. In business terms, Heathkit isn't something that he would have respected as anything but an unscalable niche hobby. Sucks that he would've been right about that.
    - musicale 3y ago
      All of these things are true. Jobs was clearly brilliant and creative and also ultimately a shrewd (and somewhat ruthless) businessman. But he was right about the transformative power of building things yourself.

rwl4 3y ago

They seem to be down. In the meantime: https://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop https://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heat... As a kid, I remember seeing their Hero 2000 on Mr Wizard. It ignited my imagination and I ordered a catalog. Then I saw the price. I went on to get a number of other robots, mostly from Tomy, but they paled in comparison to Hero 2000. When I got a little older, I even started reading about neural networks. Shame I never went further with that!

acidburnNSA 3y ago
I put a few pics and videos of my dad's old Hero Jr. up. I barely remember him piecing it together as one of my earliest memories. Still works fine. Had a little Y2K glitch but was no problem. Just thinks it's 1923 now. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-hero-jr-personal-robot-from-heathkit-a-1984-product-way-ahead-of-its-time/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-hero-jr-personal-rob... A guy keeps contacting me to try to sell his if you want one.
- rwl4 3y ago
  Thanks for the offer. TBH, now that I'm older, I have come to realize that some super neat-o things don't really fit into my life and would be sadly neglected. I've contemplated creating a display case in my office of all the gadgets I've bought over the years that are in pristine condition.
- quercusa 3y ago
  The sonar sensor looks like the one from the Polaroid SX-70, another wonder of that age.
varjag 3y ago
As a kid in then-USSR I've seen Heathkit Hero in a translated book on robotics. It felt like a piece of tech from Alpha Centauri.
ncr100 3y ago
(humor?) Server is in an unheathy state

gregoriol 3y ago

First, Cloudflare verification Then, Internal Server Error Love it!

bigattichouse 3y ago
Hackernews hug of death.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

My father, a consummate scientist, geologist, and radio geek, hand-built our home component stereo system from Heathkits. That includes speakers, turntable, receiver/tuner and amplifier. He also ran speaker wires through the walls so that the impressively massive speakers could take their rightful place along the long wall of our living room. The stereo was installed in an ornate antique piece of wood furniture which we referred to as "The Commode" for reasons I can't fathom. EDIT: apparently, "commode" has been a word for normal furniture way longer than it was a euphemism for "toilet". It was a long, long time until I truly and deeply appreciated what a labor of love, and what a technical achievement that must have been for my father to build that. I never really liked the stereo because it seemed obsolete before its time and didn't sound all that good, but man, handbuilt. Hats off to you, papa.

markbnj 3y ago
Came here to say this. My Dad also built our stereo, as well as our first color television, from Heathkit kits. He built some other stuff too... an aircraft radio receiver I think. He was a mechanical engineer (now retired). I remember hanging out in his workshop as he pieced the projects together. It was my first exposure to real electronics and componentry.
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  Did that TV have an ultrasonic remote? Cause our heathkit TV did…
  - dole 3y ago
    My dad built our color console TV from Heathkit and we had at least one of those remotes. Besides volume and channel rocker buttons, it also had them for the tint and contrast too (?) and that was about it, IIRC.
ambientenv 3y ago
Wonderful! Had similar experiences, too. My dad and I built the AR1500 receiver together on top of the ping pong table in the basement. My first "transistor radio" as a kid was also a Heathkit. I can recall test equipment like a VTVM and other stuff which we also built together. It was a great introduction to electronics and radio with lifelong benefits.

W-Stool 3y ago

Before there were personal computers if you were a geek you likely studied to get a ham radio license and built Heathkit amateur radios. This was me in the early 70s as a kid and it really helped propel me into a IT career later on when the technology became affordable/available. Heathkit was really something back in the day!

ghaff 3y ago
Heathkit was of an era when you could still reasonably build non-toy electronics projects from components without unreasonably expensive test equipment and other tools. It arguably wasn't until Raspberry Pi and Arduinos that we got back to that, albeit at a different level of abstraction.
- alden5 3y ago
  I'd say between that healthkit and arduino's it was snap-circuits which allowed kids like me to get into electronics, the manual was detailed and looking back it's fairly technical although it unfortunately it always assumed you knew what they meant, the manual would tell you to never short circuit the battery but 7-y/old me was so confused as to why you shouldn't because it never got into things like electron flow.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Way back when I remember having having this kit which consisted of magnetic blocks that were variously switches, diodes, buzzers, etc. that you could snap together to build various types of circuits. At one point I had something else that was closer to a breadboard (though it wasn't) but as I vaguely recall it had a lot more options but it was hard to actually build a working circuit. I did briefly get into Heathkit after I graduated school at one point and built a power supply that I still use sometimes but it was pretty much the end of the Heathkit era at that point.
    - tamaharbor 3y ago
      Raytheon Lectron!

drones 3y ago

Wow! I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over this. I sometimes get a little jealous of the old timers - I think being able to grow up with the evolution of computers and learn as they become more complex is a really wonderful thing. Had a look around and I'm interested in buying this microcontroller kit, has anyone tried this before? What did you think?: https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215708/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/introductory-microcomputer-microcontroller-experimenter-kit-heathkit-educational-systems-ex-1001-54?category=28 https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215708/https://shop.heat... I took a Nand2Tetris course at my Uni and really enjoyed it, but was disappointed when there was no practical element for physically building any of the circuits. Hoping this can scratch my itch.

privong 3y ago
> I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over this. Unfortunately Heathkit didn't really make kits from 1992 until recently (I think the past year or two, though the Wikipedia article[0] is vague on when it resumed), aside from a brief, failed attempt in 2012. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
thinkmassive 3y ago
Retrocomputing continues to increase in popularity. In addition to the Heatkit, you might be interested in kits from RC2014, SmartyKit, Ben Eater, Foenix C256, etc. There’s many more that are based around an RPi or microcontroller if you’re less concerned about authenticity.
stevekemp 3y ago
Take a look at https://www.tindie.com/ https://www.tindie.com/ there are many single-board Z80/6502 computers that you can assemble for sale. You could start smaller with other simple devices, but there are lot of options if you click around.
koromak 3y ago
Ben Eater might be up your ally. Just finished his 8-bit CPU build, boy it was an experience. https://eater.net/8bit/ https://eater.net/8bit/

johnnyballgame 3y ago

I remember my dad building the depth-finder/fish-finder. We always had it in the boat with us. Who knows if it ever really helped us find fish, but we sure had fun with it. Side note - I really miss that you can barely buy RC car "kits" anymore. Everything now comes RTR (ready-to-run). And that takes most of the fun out of it, for me at least.

Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
Beside traxxas, nearly all manufacturer propose kit, especially for high end rc car :) For plane and quadcopter it’s way harder though :\ submarines is still a more open field though ! Then there’s the hydraulics model. None are in kit, which saddens me a lot. Maybe too dangerous for common folk (like building a tube amp)

AlbertCory 3y ago

I built an FM tuner from a kit that I actually used for a long time. Looked kinda funky, though. They're the only reason I've ever heard of Benton Harbor, MI.

jpmattia 3y ago

So glad to see the return of these guys. Growing up in the 70s, they were one of the few portals to the universe of electrical engineering.

euroderf 3y ago

dunno how Velleman kits might stack up in terms of educational value.

sizzzzlerz 3y ago

I bought a morse code keyer from Heathkit when I was a kid. It was the only thing I could afford at the time but I spent many hours reading their catalog and lusting over their ham radio kits.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

My first program was for a Heathkit programmable calculator that I got (and put together) in the mid-1970s.

_yb2s 3y ago

Growing up as a (young? future? wannabe?) engineer kid in the 90s, I immediately knew who the powerful old engineering wizards were upon walking into their house, because of the 'Heathkit' logos on inconspicuous devices. On more than one occasion, I would end up at a house party of people I didn't know, and then start hunting for whomever made those Heathkits, because I knew they would be an amazing person to meet, that could teach me something.

robomartin 3y ago

I still have a pair of robot arms form the Hero 2000 robot. Nice and robust. Not too fast, yet it wouldn't be too hard to update them to use DC brushless motors, etc. http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html

webprofusion 3y ago
I always wanted the Hero robot - it was in the Maplin catalog when I was about 9yrs old :)

squarefoot 3y ago

I hope to be wrong; as an European I know Heathkit only from what was published back in the day on Electronics magazines, the occasional kit that arrived here and the archive of old projects of that era still available online [0,1], however this appears to me as a completely different business with mostly overpriced products; as for now all I see is the name. [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit [1] https://archive.org/search?query=Heathkit https://archive.org/search?query=Heathkit

_whiteCaps_ 3y ago

I still use my Heathkit power supply that I built in the 90's. I should give my dad a call and thank him for buying it for me. Between that and the TI 99/4A, it led me to my career in software development.

noefingway 3y ago

In the early to mid-60s I built a shortwave radio and a digital clock. Unfortunately neither survived. I still think about that clock sitting by my bed, glowing reddish orange. Sigh....

mark_l_watson 3y ago

When I was a kid in, I think it was 1959, my Dad bought me a Heathkit short wave radio. I did much of the soldering myself, with my Dad supervising. The radio worked and for years afterwards, I listened to long wavelength broadcasts from around the world. I had an antenna in our yard that was 30 feet off the ground, and we lived on a hill. I was amazed at what I could receive.

ddingus 3y ago
I did a similar thing in the late 70's. While maybe there was less to receive, it was a core experience I value.

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Starwatcher2001 3y ago

One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit to launch a life long interest in electronics. Still have the PSU in the loft and a handful of old circuits lovingly converted to Veroboard, or homemake PCBs made from copper-clad board etched with ferric chloride (until my mum got the vapours about me "messing around with chemicals" and stopped that route).

cf100clunk 3y ago

Back in the 1950s and '60s my dad built a few EICO kit devices. They were another supplier of build-it-yourself electronic testing equipment to go along with Heathkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eico There was a lot of military surplus gear back then too for DIYers.

WalterBright 3y ago

I built several Heathkids, including an H11 (PDP-11 computer) with all the accessories. They were all a wonderful experience. The kits were excellent.

crunkykd 3y ago

I remember getting a Lafayette 3-pickup electric guitar and building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. That thing had a dual-spring reverb too. I got a 4x12" speaker cabinet with Celstion speakers from the newspaper classifieds for $75. That thing was loud, and had a super high-frequency squeal when you turned it up. I think they just used a high-bandwidth amp design from their scopes rather than design a ground-up audio amp. But it taught me about oscillations, shocks from ungrounded chassis voltages, and electronics in general.

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heathkit.com/shop http://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heath... https://archive.ph/68k0r https://archive.ph/68k0r

rmason 3y ago

My entire ham radio station was built from Heathkits in the sixties. I still have the transceiver and linear amplifier in storage. Been meaning to replace all the capacitors and fire it back up. It would be like restoring a car I drove in my teen age years, reminding me of many good times. Got on their mailing list when they attempted a comeback but haven't heard a thing from them in years.

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

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p1mrx 3y ago

https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm-gc-1006-26 https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm... > So the time stays accurate and the alarm stays active with no line power--for weeks. > Batteries: 6 AA cells required (not included). Seems strange to brag about 6 AA batteries keeping time for a few weeks, when there are watches that run for 10 years on a coin cell. Maybe the batteries actually power the LEDs?

ddingus 3y ago
Different processes. The watches run at 32768 Hz. And they have crazy efficient electronics. A couple of gates in your clock likely exceed the entire power budget of a watch.

wduquette 3y ago

In the mid-70's my dad built a Heathkit-branded DEC PDP-11, with a dumb terminal and a paper tape reader/punch for I/O. Later he got dual 8" floppy drive, and upgraded the memory from 16K to 28K (the maximum!). I learned to program BASIC and Pascal on that machine (with a few nods at Assembler and FORTRAN 4), and never looked back. Still programming today.

MrFoof 3y ago

Our family TV growing up was a Heathkit. Somewhere in the 20-25” range, with a (wired) remote control. My father built his way up to it. They kept it around for over 25 years. The reality is if anything went wrong with it, my father still had the instructions and could just refer to it to ultimately perform a repair.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

Heathkit products were available in the UK but relatively expensive. That market niche was taken by a huge electronics hobbyist industry which included ten or so popular stores, a handful of monthly magazines, and various suppliers of project kits. The kits were advertised in the magazines and occasionally a kit would be featured as a project. Bigger projects could be spread over many months, with fairly minimal assembly instructions - often just a board view with component IDs/values - but relatively detailed "How it works" breakdowns. There would also be regular features about technician/cookbook-level design topics. Not exactly EE grad level engineering, but enough of an overview to glue simple circuits together. While some kits were complete others required inventive design for packaging, labelling, and board connections. IMO it was more diverse and DIY-oriented scene with a smaller range of projects, but less hand-holding and more educational background detail. I know the US had a similar scene, but some of the UK magazines had an attitude that was irreverent, fun, but still educational. I don't think there was a US equivalent. I still wish we could have afforded an H11 though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11

musicale 3y ago

I like the surface-mount soldering kit.

Animats 3y ago

The new owner of Heathkit showed up at a wake for the maker movement a few years back. TechShop and Maker Faire people were there, too. The Heathkit guy said that making a new kit was surprisingly hard and took about six months to go from prototype to user-buildable kit. Heathkit today is very retro. If you want to look forward, there's Adafruit and Seeed Studio.

8bitsrule 3y ago

I might pay $130 for a reliable clock AND AM AND FM-stereo radio in one box. But no, the statement that "AM broadcast radio is the best band for learning about radio" is just about as wrong as it can get, kids. Except then they say "you might hear stations from half-way across the continent". Well, in that case, if you like Talk radio, 7MHz might be your best choice. (Antenna's a lot shorter too.)

vertnerd 3y ago

I put together the Heathkit HW-101 SSB/CW ham radio transceiver in the summer of 1977. It was one of the happiest times of my life. Now that I think about it, that probably explains a lot about me.

ChrisRR 3y ago

I wish people would put at least some blurb in the title if they're just going to post random links. Sure it's interesting, but it's not tied to any recent news, and so I have to click every link just to find out if it's interesting to me

hypertexthero 3y ago
Sorry about that! I’ll remember to do so next time.

runamok 3y ago

I'd like to get the ruler but the shipping is rather pricey. $17 for USPS priority when the product is $59.95. Perhaps because of its dimensions.

nahnahg 3y ago

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williamDafoe 3y ago

I have to agree that Heathkit instructions often carried completely bogus theories of operation. I remember my 3-transistor experimental circuits set. When the manual tried to explain transistors it had a little guy at the top of the stairway which was the emitter waiting at a door that was opened and closed by a guy from the base wire and when they went through the door they went out through the collector (PNP transistor). Semiconductors are so simple that it would have been easier to give a real explanation than this ridiculous piece of bologne!

dddddrr 3y ago

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